Tag Archives: Linux

A client recently complained that his Windows XP computer had run slowly for weeks and now Windows wouldn’t start. Following power on, the Windows XP splash screen appeared for a few seconds, followed by a system reset. This sequence would repeat in an endless loop.

A low-level check of the disk revealed no bad sectors and Memtest86 revealed no bad cells. I used an Ubuntu (a Linux distro) boot CD-ROM; Ubuntu couldn’t see any partitions on the hard drive(!). This is not good news. I booted from a BartPE1 CD-ROM. It couldn’t see any partitions on the hard drive either. I booted from a Windows XP setup CD with a view to doing a repair install, but it could not see a Windows partition or system on the hard drive. Uh-oh.

The cure for this sick pup? Boot from a BartPE CD-ROM, go to the command prompt, and enter the command CHKDSK C: /F. On this disk, chkdsk needed nine hours(!) to repair the NTFS partition and its table. At the 19% point during phase 1, the screen didn’t update for more than an hour. Several times, the PC seemed to have frozen. I was tempted to shutdown BartPE, but the PC’s drive activity light indicated that something was accessing the hard drive, so I allowed it to continue.

After nine hours, chkdsk reported that it had finished repairing the disk and exited to the DOS prompt. I rebooted the PC. Sure enough, Windows started and ran. A quick look revealed tbat the 160 GB disk had 0 (zero!) bytes free. This sick puppy needed more attention, but at least its data could now be salvaged.

I don’t need BartPE often, but when I need to access an NTFS partition and run a Windows or DOS command on a machine that can’t boot Windows, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

BartPE (Bart’s Preinstalled Environment) is a lightweight variant of the 32-bit version of Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, similar to Windows Preinstallation Environment, which can be run from a Live CD or Live USB drive. – from Wikipedia

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Evi Nemeth, who authored text books on Unix system administration, is missing while sailing in the Tasman Sea (infamous for treacherous winter storms) from New Zealand to Australia. Born in 1940, since 1980 she taught computer science and networking at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since retiring in 2001, she’s sailed her 40-foot boat everywhere. In New Zealand, she hopped aboard a friend’s old 70-foot wooden sailboat with six other people. The condition of the boat is controversial: Lost yacht Nina an unsafe ‘lead mine’. The boat and all aboard her has been missing since June 4, when they radioed that they’d run into severe weather.

Evi’s UNIX System Administration Handbook was published in 1989. I found it an easy to understand useful reference. She later wrote a Linux administration handbook. I like the fact that she seems to have lived by her own rules, in a cabin heated by a wood-burning stove outside Boulder. It was destroyed this year in a forest fire, but she planned to rebuild. I hope that she’s found soon.

The United Space Alliance, which manages the computers aboard the International Space Station in association with NASA, has announced that the Windows XP computers aboard the ISS have been switched to Linux. “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable.”

Apparently computers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) already run various distributions of Linux. I’m not surprised: once installed, Linux is more stable than Windows and techies enjoy having its source code freely available so that they can modify it to suit the mission. Its biggest problem, in my opinion, is its hundreds of dialects.

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China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has signed an agreement with Canonical to develop a version of Canonical’s Ubuntu desktop operating system for use throughout China.

The new operating system will be named Ubuntu Kylin. Today more than 90 percent of China’s desktops are estimated to be running Microsoft Windows.

Canonical stated,

Ubuntu Kylin goes beyond language localisation and includes features and applications that cater for the Chinese market. In the 13.04 release, Chinese input methods and Chinese calendars are supported, there is a new weather indicator, and users can quickly search across the most popular Chinese music services from the Dash. Future releases will include integration with Baidu maps and leading shopping service Taobao, payment processing for Chinese banks, and real-time train and flight information. The Ubuntu Kylin team is cooperating with WPS, the most popular office suite in China, and is creating photo editing and system management tools which could be incorporated into other flavours of Ubuntu worldwide. . . Future work will extend beyond the desktop to other platforms.

Development of Ubuntu Kylin will be done at a facility in Beijing by programmers from the China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Center (CSIP), the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), and Canonical. They’ve named the facility the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab.

I was given a client’s Windows XP Pro PC with a hard drive with 50,000 hours of power-on time. This machine is mission-critical: it functions as both a server and a client for a 2-user version of Quickbooks and runs a proprietary point-of-sale system. The client had almost run out of storage space on the drive’s System partition. It was overdue for replacement.

There are 3 disks in this saga:

The original disk

The second (larger) disk, to which I hoped to copy the programs and data from disk 1

A third disk, which I found was necessary

There are a number of programs that make the cloning process easy: Drive Image, Norton Ghost, and Acronis True Image. Each boots from the CD-drive. I used Acronis True Image. All went smoothly until I tried to boot from the new drive: it wouldn’t boot. No error message. Nothing. I repeated the cloning process, with the same result. I replaced the original disk and booted from it. The BIOS reported “An operating system can not be found”. Uh-oh. I had a computer that wouldn’t boot from either disk 1 or disk 2.

Has system hardware failed?

At this point, I began looking for hardware problems. Flaky memory can cause boot problems. I removed the four memory sticks, cleaned their contacts, and tried again. No joy. It was late Saturday night so I booted the DOS Ultimate Boot CD and ran memTest86 overnight.

By Sunday afternoon memTest86 had looped through all memory 6 times and found only one bad memory cell during just one of its 6 passes. I chalked this up to a random cosmic ray hit. The problem wasn’t memory.

Partition Magic won’t load partitions

I wasn’t sure what my next step would be, but I guessed that I’d need the surface of another disk to work with, so I bought another (250 GB) disk and installed Windows XP Pro on it, followed by Partition Magic, and hung both damaged disks on the same machine. Partition Magic reported that the original disk had no partitions on it. Partition Magic wouldn’t load when the second disk was installed, complaining that the disk’s System partition was too damaged. Yikes!

Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) to the rescue

I booted from a Linux (Ubuntu 10.04) Live CD and examined the disk with Ubuntu’s gnome disk utility. To my relief, it allowed me to mount the damaged partition. I rebooted Ubuntu with disk 3 and learned that while Partition Magic wouldn’t always mount partitions that had been created by gnome’s gparted (gnome partition editor), gparted and gnome disk utility would always mount partitions that were created by Partition Magic.

Partition Magic and Ubuntu’s disk tools co-operate

I used Partition Magic to create a new primary (bootable) NTFS partition on disk 3, installed both disks 2 and 3, booted from Ubuntu Live CD, and mounted the damaged System partition on disk 2. Then I used gnome’s disk utility to copy the entire contents of disk 2’s damaged System partition to the new NTFS partition on disk 3. I performed a similar operation for disk 2’s Data partition.

Then I just needed to boot from disk 3 (using the copy of Windows that I’d just installed on its first partition), run Partition Magic, move the partitions around and rename them so that it would boot from the System partition into which I’d just copied all those files. Crossed my fingers, restarted, and . . . it worked!

What had happened to disk 1?

Both Windows’ Partition Magic and Ubuntu’s gparted reported that it had no partitions on it(!) — that it was all “unallocated”. It appears that the sectors where its partition table and MBR (master boot record) are located failed during the cloning process. Cloning a disk works it pretty hard, reading every sector from sector 0 to its last sector.

Summary of our 3 disks after this saga:

The original disk is scrap.

The second disk will be used to provide an image backup

Installed and working in client’s computer.

All that remains is to create an image backup from disk 3 to disk 2, and everyone can sleep peacefully.

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Aaron Patzer worried about his personal finances, and wanted to be sure that he received maximum return on his resources. He tried Intuit’s Quicken and Microsoft Money, but discovered that neither could dynamically track interest rates or move funds so that he’d receive the highest returns.

Since he couldn’t find anything to manage his finances the way that he wanted, he decided to create a web-based application that could. He wrote it in Java, used the open source MySQL database, and called it www.mint.com. He obtained venture capital, rolled it out in 2007, and sold it to Intuit late last year. It’s supported by advertising and is available for free.

I don’t bank on-line (call me paranoid), so I can’t vouch for the utility or security of mint.com. Here’s a good review. If I were to bank on-line, I’d use a dedicated Linux machine to do so. One method of doing this is to create a Ubuntu Live CD, and, when I wanted to use my regular PC to bank on-line, I’d shut down Windows, boot from the Ubuntu Live CD, and use Ubuntu’s Firefox web browser to log on to my bank’s site.

A customer came to me with a low-mileage 1999 vintage laptop which she wished to use for occasional web browsing. (specs: Dell Inspiron 3500. 333 MHz CPU, 64 MB Ram, 4.7 GB disk. Every spec was about one-tenth of today’s PCs!). It was running Windows 98 Second Edition. Microsoft stopped providing Windows 98 updates years ago, and Windows 98 is now very vulnerable to attack. Worse, today’s anti-virus and anti-spyware programs won’t run on it. Shouldn’t she just scrap the laptop?

A very limited resource laptop, but Xubuntu runs fine

Since the laptop was in like-new condition, we decided to extend its life by injecting some 21st century blood into it. We topped up its memory slots with the maximum RAM (a mere 256 MB!) and replaced Windows 98 with Xubuntu 8.10. It’s not Microsoft Windows, but to a user it appears similar, and includes a word processor, spreadsheet, graphics / photo editor, and Mozilla Firefox web browser. I’ve not been able to get its onboard soundcard to work, but everything else works.

There are three big upsides to any Linux-based desktop operating system when compared to MS Windows:

It frees the user from constantly worrying about Windows Updates to patch vulnerabilties

No anti-virus or anti-spyware programs are needed (Yay! )

There are no Windows licensing headaches.

A potential downside is that Windows applications won’t run on Linux without the assistance of either Wine or running a copy of Windows XP within a virtual machine.

If you have a tired desktop or laptop PC — especially one without a legitimate Windows license — consider breathing new life into it with some form of Linux. Most are available for free, such as http://www.xubuntu.org/ I tried Damn Small Linux (too minimal for this case), Puppy Linux (it was okay, but just barely), and Xubuntu 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04. Xubuntu 9.04 added some features but did something to slow response to user inputs. I settled on Xubuntu 8.10. (Xubuntu imposes a lighter load on the hardware than Ubuntu because it has a leaner desktop.)

Try it before you install it

You can first just boot with the Xubuntu (or Ubuntu) Live CD, to see whether it’s acceptable and runs okay on your hardware. (Of course it’ll be slow when booting off the CD-ROM drive.) If so, you can install it on your hard drive from the same CD-ROM.

Oh — one caveat: Xubuntu and its siblings may not install without problems on all hardware. I’m now fighting to get it to install on a 1.1 GHz AMD Athlon desktop PC — I have no idea why it won’t install on this system, yet it installed with almost no problems on the old laptop. Let me know of your Linux adventures, please.

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Tom Tom built their GPS devices on the open source GNU/Linux platform, not Microsoft’s proprietary platform.

I’m very happy with my TomTom One 125 car GPS. It’s the best $100 I’ve spent in a long time. (It was on sale at Sears on the Friday after Thanksgiving day. You can find them for that price or less now.) It’s a fantastic product, offering incredible bang for the buck. One reason is that neither TomTom nor its users pay what’s called “the Microsoft tax”; TomTom’s software is built upon the GNU/Linux operating system — not Microsoft’s Windows CE (or whatever they call it this week).

One result of not paying the Microsoft tax is that Tom Tom was able to invest money in a beautiful and functional piece of industrial design and manufacture it to a high standard. So, users benefit.

The empire strikes back

Microsoft is miffed at losing this revenue. It recently filed a lawsuit against TomTom (a Dutch company), claiming that TomTom’s software infringes on eight Microsoft patents, apparently revolving around the FAT (File Allocation Table) and FAT32 file systems. Pundits claim that this lawsuit is aimed at the heart of GNU/Linux: the entire concept of open-source software. Apparently Microsoft chose TomTom — located in Holland — as a target because US legal precedents don’t favor Microsoft’s argument.

Other mainstream consumer devices that sell by the millions (for example, Tivo) have shunned Microsoft in favor of Linux. This lawsuit is equivalent to The Empire striking back at those rogue manufacturers who’ve refused to fall into line and pay “the Microsoft tax”. The outcome of this case will affect how much we’ll pay for cellphones, GPS units . . . and most other devices that are software-driven.

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Gordon Welchman was an Englishman who, while working on decoding German messages at Bletchley Park during World War II, invented traffic analysis. His idea was that even if one couldn’t decipher message contents, just tabulating who messaged whom, when, and how frequently, lent knowledge about the enemy.

After the war, he emigrated to America, where he became an American citizen and taught the first computer course at M.I.T. He worked for Remington Rand and eventually for the MITRE Corporation, where he enhanced traffic analysis technology and helped develop C3 (Command, Control, and Communication) systems.

Following the publication of his book The Hut Six Story in 1982, which detailed the work of his Hut Six group at Bletchley Park, his security clearance was revoked. This killed his career in intelligence.

Well, both snowboarding and skiing. Reminds me of water skiing. The middle east coast states received buckets of snow this weekend and these New Yorkers made the best of it. Yes, that looks like Broadway in Times Square.

“It re-writes the history of technology.”

I love this parody. It’s a humorous advertisement for your own mail server:

Do you run a government agency but hate complying with the law? Then you need DC Matic, the Hillary Clinton-approved email server!

credit: Written and performed by Remy. Video directed and edited by Meredith Bragg

What’s Hillary hiding? Classified emails? Sure. Evidence of her negligence in Benghazi that led to the murders of US citizens? Of course. Security breaches via assistant Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood connections? Probably. No, the ticking time bomb in this server is bribery. Maybe treason as well. She’s hiding written evidence of her deals that traded State Department help in exchange for large donations to the Clinton Foundation and large fees for speaking engagements by Bill Clinton.

Both Swope and Obama were elected to office by fools who suffer from chronic white guilt.

In 1969, Putney Swope announced:

The changes I’m gonna make will be minimal. I’m not gonna rock the boat. Rockin’ the boat’s a drag. What you do is sink the boat.

In 2008, Barack Obama bragged:

. . . we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.

Mr. Obama is trying to transform America, alright. Transform it from a prosperous capitalist economy governed by a constitutional republic to a bankrupt socialist economy governed by a corrupt tyrannical dictatorship. Barack is following Putney’s credo, “What you do is sink the boat.”

The tune, “Slow Down”, is performed on piano and sung by its composer, Larry Williams. He was from New Orleans (of course). The tune, ringing with ninth chords, was released on disc in 1958. I think that the dancers are from a 1950s Hollywood rock & roll movie. Larry also composed Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Bad Boy, and Bony Moronie — classic rock tunes, all. He was born in 1935 and died on this date, January 7, in 1980.

In the mid-1950s, Williams inherited star billing from Little Richard (who’d forsaken rock and roll for religion) at New Orleans’ record label Specialty Records.

While Williams was alive, the Beatles paid their respects by admirably covering Larry’s Dizzy Miss Lizzy, Slow Down, and Bad Boy. I’m amazed that Larry Williams isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Extra credit assignment: Compare and contrast the Beatles’ cover of Slow Down with Larry Williams’ original. This clip includes the fab four wailing in Liverpool’s Cavern Club: (If YouTube has taken down this video clip, you can hear the same recording with groovy rock and roll clips (sorry — requires Flash) from 1950s America and early Beatles. Sorry for the Flash format.)

I’m delighted to discover that the video of Joni Mitchell’s classic Shadows and Light concert (1980) can be viewed in full (1h 13m) on YouTube. Supporting players are Jaco Pastorius on bass, Pat Metheny on guitar, Michael Brecker on sax, Don Alias on drums, Lyle Mays on keyboards, and The Persuasions. It’s among my favorite videos of a concert performance.

Jaco Pastorius

Jaco was a Fort Lauderdale kid who began playing in rock bands around town in a variety of clubs: She, The 4 O’Clock CLub, The Village Zoo, The Flying Machine, The Button, Bachelors III, Ocean Mist . . . When I first heard Jaco in the early 1970s, he was playing bass for straight-ahead local rock bands. He graduated to more jazz- and fusion- related music and put his unique fretless Fender bass stamp on Weather Report. I’ve heard bass players tell me that they tried to imitate Jaco’s technique, but gave up trying; they claim that Jaco changed what it meant to play electric bass guitar. Jaco’s friend Pat Metheny, who plays a beautiful lead guitar in this concert, is a University of Miami music school graduate.

Jaco seemed to still have his act together when he played this concert. Wikipedia has a good Jaco biography. He had a rapid rise to the top followed by a quick ride back down again. I had musician friends c 1984-87 who were torn up watching their friend Jaco dismantle his life. This Warner Brothers recording artist and Down Beat Hall of Fame member was sleeping on park benches and shooting baskets in a local public park.

Michael Brecker and Don Alias died a few years ago.

This is a classic performance by master musicians who were at the top of their games. Too bad it couldn’t last forever.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, the FCC is considering disciplining NBC for airing an indecent performance on July 6, Miley Cyrus’ “Bangerz Tour”. I watched it. It was provocative, but artful. Bertolt Brecht would have loved the production: live dancers against rear-projection oversized animation with creative costumes and lighting. I loved it. Some of the images, such as Miley riding a giant “Mr. Wiener”, were sexually suggestive.

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

The concert (recorded in Barcelona) reminded me of Madonna’s shows twenty-five years ago. Both performers have acceptable contralto voices, energetic dance skills, and assemble exciting Brechtian spectacles. I love the costuming and choreopgraphy. Shocking? “Bangerz” pushed the limits on prime-time American TV, I suppose. But that week on television, the atrocious performance by the Brazilian football team was truly shocking.

I’d prefer that the FCC take no action on this. They have enough serious issues on their plate already. Censoring art is, in my opinion, a slippery slope for any government agency . . . and I think that this production can be labeled “art”. Here’s the full show (862MB H264 1h 25m mp4 video file, 720 x 404 pixel) for download or streaming:

Click to stream or download full 862 Megabyte video performance

You’ll need a fast Internet connection to smoothly stream this. You might be better to download the file and then play it locally with a good video player such as VLC.

Is it Miley’s performance or just modern low distortion recording technique that for the first time makes John Lennon’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” lyrics (at 44m 35s) sound so . . . so . . . clear, logical, and complete?

I’ve worked with integrated circuits (I.C.s) since the 1960s, but haven’t been involved in their manufacture — only their application.

Intel Haswell wafer with a pin for scalephoto: Intel Free PressToday’s integrated circuit manufacture is a high stakes capital intensive business whose players use trade secrets to maintain their market advantage. I’ve never been inside an I.C. “fab” (factory), so it was a treat to find an hour-long presentation by an industry manufacturing engineer on YouTube. The technologies used at nano dimensions are mind-boggling.

Here’s the excellent presentation, in full:

The speaker mentions that lithographic imaging of the mask is now being done at 193 nanometer (nm). As you can see, we’re well above visible light and on our way to x-rays(!). Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum in that region:

Click for full-sizegraphic by: Shigeru23
The presentation is aimed at the layperson and is filled with surprises. For instance, one gigabyte of semiconductor memory can be produced on a flat substrate within the diameter of a human hair. I give it two (gloved) thumbs up.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

I’m the one that’s gonna have to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life the way I want to. — Jimi Hendrix

I just listened to an excellent interview with Walt Mossberg, who since 1991 wrote a weekly computer industry column for the Wall Street Journal. Walt’s now retired. Leo Laporte, an industry podcaster, coaxes some great stories from Mr. Mossberg.

Walt’s perspective was always that of a user — not a tech freak. Most industry reporters are techies who don’t appreciate that most of us don’t care about the inner workings and secret mechanisms of computers.

Walt speaks a bit about his long relationships with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. (Walt sat in the passenger seat as Gates, frustrated by traffic, drove his Lexus for miles on the road’s shoulder.)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, I loved ABBA’s music. I was pleased to discover this recent critique, in both spoken and written form. I didn’t realize that ABBA were considered politically incorrect in their home country.

Intelligent Life magazine‘s Matthew Sweet observes that ABBA’s songs progressed from naiveté through sophistication to melancholy. As Matthew says, “Many of their songs are about accepting the failure of relationships”.

Here’s the companion article, Thank You for the Music, by Matthew Sweet, from a recent issue of Intelligent Life. Both the article and the audio clip stem from his visit to Stockholm’s ABBA Museum.

These observations will help you get the most from your swimming. (They’re from Australian podcast Effortless Swimming). Each is a short audio clip of less than ten minutes. (The first truth is that one or two swim workouts a week won’t cut it.)

Now that not just one, but two movies (Breaking The Code and The Imitation Game) have been produced about Alan Turing, it’s time we had a movie about Ada Lovelace. She seems to have possessed an unusual combination of precise reasoning and imagination, strong will, and feminine charm. Plus, she was in the middle of a tug o war between her feuding parents, poet Lord Byron and his wife Anne Isabella.

Why is Ada important? She’s acknowledged to be the first computer programmer (c 1840!). Like Mozart and Turing, her life was tragically cut short at a young age. I propose this biopic today because it’s Ada Lovelace Day!

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8.1, and you’re sick of being nagged by Microsoft’s pop-up to upgrade to Windows 10, go to the Ultimate Outsider website and download and install their GWX Control Panel. It’s received rave reviews. Cost: gratis. Here’s the full description.

New and Improved Method

Update, April 3, 2016: Steve Gibson, founder of GRC (Gibson Research Corp), has written a great little freeware utility that also blocks upgrades to Windows 10. Steve writes most of his code in assembler, so his utilities are tiny. He calls this newest utility Never10. He’s created a page dedicated to Never10, where you may download it for free. It’s only 81 kilobyes in size and doesn’t require installation on your Windows PC. You need just run it once to turn off upgrades to Windows 10, and run it again to allow upgrades to Windows 10. Short and sweet, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Installing two or more application programs on a PC can chew up your time as you wade through web pages, download prompts that don’t always work, and questions and answers. Now ninite.com (http://ninite.com/) does this tedious work for you. I’ve tried it on a few PCs and it’s worked flawlessly. Install everything in one easy step on your brand-new Windows 7 PC!